Professor Raghavan N. Iyer

To persist in this thought is to raise fundamental questions about real being as opposed to embodied existence, about that which is within and without, omnipresent and invisible.

by removing consciousness from its habitual confinement to narrow categories. Such meditation will cleanse the mind.

Meditation must go even deeper, however, in order to generate a notion of absolute abstract space, without reference to subjects or objects.

The point must be reached where there is a dissolution of the sense of I in reference to a pristine sense of self-existence. The notion of an I cannot arise unless there is already a separation in consciousness

Between the self within and the self as embodied. Between the self in contemplation and the self that is extended without.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the persistently intrusive nature of eye consciousness during attempts at meditation, much less daily life, should understand the tremendous effort of abstraction, of imagination, and of depth in meditation, needed to reverse the false order of priority.

which immersion in the imminent world of space-time imposes upon the pure stream of unmodified consciousness.

Ego consciousness insists upon pronouncing this or that as real. It imposes its own polarized constructions on appearances, maintaining that that which is more real is dark or empty, and has to be discovered by removing perceptible layers.

In fact, however, the opposite is true. Spiritually, what is real is what is unmodified, what can never be penetrated by analysis of the differentiated realm of space-time, of subjects and objects.

From the standpoint of spirit, everything that emerges is unreal, because it is only a veil upon that which is hidden behind it, not in the manner of subtle phenomena veiled by grosser phenomena,

but in the manner of noumena which transcend phenomena entirely. All phenomena, whether they seem subtle or mundane, are equally unreal. Their reality is at best a relative mode of existence,

relative to the observer and to most sense perceptions, relative to the concepts and the cogitations of individual subjects, relative to phases and states of evolving consciousness,

Even more fundamental than the veil of concept is the veil of maya, illusion itself.

Even to speak of Maya is as mysterious and metaphysical as talking about blankness, absolute abstract space, or nothingness. The doctrine of Maya is really a doctrine about time and causality.

about consciousness and veiling, about the many layered nature of space. When the contemporary physicist says that the universe is space and matter,

This is but a dim reflection of the ancient idea that the universe is both nirvana and maya. There is something illusory about matter, but there is also something at the root of matter which is pure, homogeneous,

and eternal. There is numinal substance beyond maya. There is also that about space which is beyond all possible dimensions.

Even thinking of space as multidimensional does not reach to the soul of the concept. To ascend in consciousness into the realm of pure, noumenal substance

and absolute abstract space, one must come to terms with the problem of the ego. The ego, or the sense of I, is that which consolidates, separates and appropriates both subject and object.

nurturing a sense of possession and self-protectiveness. It is that in consciousness which seems to be engaged in a dubious process of preserving something, a sense of identity, but a something that turns out to be nothing in the eye of eternity.